recommended reading

Here are some recommended reading lists on a small number of topics I’ve had the good fortune and privilege to study at length. Perhaps you’ll find something that interests you.

If I could recommend only one writer, it would be the late Mark Fisher, who taught me how to think and who continues to haunt everything I write. Other writers and thinkers who matter tremendously to me, yet who rarely appear below include Rachel Carson, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Rorty. Although relatively few of these lists include works of fiction, two further figures who have affected absolutely everything I write are J. G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs.

“The short course”

I consider these texts absolutely essential for coming to terms with the manifold conditions of our existence. These are core texts that inform and support everything that follows.

Rancière shows us that learning and teaching are processes that exceed or even explode the historical, institutional constraints that transform education into a disciplinary operation by means of which an authoritative teacher supposedly transmits information to a docile, receptive student. In other words, Rancière disarticulates the process of learning from the various modes in which it is typically defanged. Instead, he shows how learning is the primary function of applied natural intelligence. If this is true, then how we approach not just formal education, but learning and teaching in all contexts, must change fundamentally. For example, instead of emphasizing certification, content, metricization, or standardization, a good teacher will focus on motivating students to exercise error-tolerant, interminable strategies of inquiry and revision. These are, in fact, strategies that everyone already employs, e.g., to navigate the world. More abstractly, Rancière argues that these apparently pedagogical insights translate into a radical conclusion about the human – namely, that all humans are equally naturally intelligent. This is because intelligence is not aggregative, such that an individual can be more or less intelligent than any other individual. Rather, intelligence is a basic faculty – the capacity to learn, or to update beliefs on the basis of interactive, motivated engagements with any content or problem whatsoever.

Feyerabend shows us how the logic of inquiry proceeds without the assistance of any programmatic method at all – and he argues that it’s a good thing, too. He uses detailed case studies from the history of science to demonstrate the crooked path by means of which knowledge finds its way and then gets supplanted. However, Feyerabend’s point is not merely that the history of inquiry is a patchwork, but that how we form inquiries in the first place benefits tremendously from this condition of epistemological anarchism. Abductive and heuristic reasoning are the best tools we have for producing knowledge or pursuing inquiries. Accordingly, Feyerabend dismisses the refuge of methodology as a fantasy at best – and, more likely, a disciplinary tool by means of which generative ideation and perceptive speculation get shut down. (See also his “How to Be a Good Empiricist: A Please for Tolerance in Matters Epistemological” [1971].) Ultimately, and ironically, given his many late provocations to contrary, Feyerabend ends up disclosing his own profound loyalty to reason, understood properly. As Feyerabend famously claims, when it comes to epistemology and method, “Anything goes.” But this is actually a fundamental insight underlying the operation of reason, because reason is a contingent process according to which any prior belief or statement undergoes tests that produce its own revision.

Left political realism

I often find myself frustrated with how contemporary political theoretical vocabularies can serve as flybottles for our thinking. These texts break with, revise, and unsettle those vocabularies in highly generative ways.

War

At present, intellectual discourses about war are consistently underrated. Warfare is a paradigm case of a complex, theory-laden, and value-saturated material process that takes place at multiple spatiotemporal scales, and much can be learned from these discourses.